Some interesting Linux industry news for you here, as the long road towards Wayland by default everywhere is taking another big step with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) removing the Xorg server and other X servers (except Xwayland) from RHEL 10 and the following releases.
From their announcement by developer Carlos Soriano Sanchez posted November 27th:
We want to recognize the significant effort all these organizations and individuals have made, especially the rest of the upstream community, without whom this project would never be so mature. This effort gave us the confidence to first make Wayland default for most use cases in RHEL 8, followed up with the deprecating of Xorg server in RHEL 9, with the intention of its removal in a future release. Earlier this year (2023), as part of our RHEL 10 planning, we made a study to understand Wayland’s status, not only from an infrastructure perspective, but also from an ecosystem perspective. The result of this evaluation is that, while there are still some gaps and applications that need some level of adaptation, we believe the Wayland infrastructure and ecosystem are in good shape, and that we’re on a good path for the identified blockers to be resolved by the time RHEL 10 is out, planned to be released on the first half of 2025.
With this, we’ve decided to remove Xorg server and other X servers (except Xwayland) from RHEL 10 and the following releases. Xwayland should be able to handle most X11 clients that won’t immediately be ported to Wayland, and if needed, our customers will be able to stay on RHEL 9 for its full life cycle while resolving the specifics needed for transitioning to a Wayland ecosystem. It’s important to note that “Xorg Server” and “X11” are not synonymous, X11 is a protocol that will continue to be supported through Xwayland, while the Xorg Server is one of the implementations of the X11 protocol.
Red Hat and their engineers have their fingers in many pies across the Linux space, so this is a pretty big move, and one they say will enable them to "tackle problems such as HDR, increased security, setups with mixed low and high density displays or very high density displays, better GPU/Display hot-plugging, better gestures and scrolling, and so on" — which of course will end up benefiting everyone because that's how open source works.
Have you fully switched over to Wayland yet?
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
TactikalKitty Nov 28, 2023
Last edited by TactikalKitty on 28 November 2023 at 2:12 pm UTC
Hopefully the wayland folks remember about the gamers when prioritizing the missing features.
BlackBloodRum Nov 28, 2023
But I honestly feel it's too soon for something like RHEL to outright drop Xorg entirely. There could be a whole heap of legacy enterprise applications which don't place nicely with Xwayland.
Luckily however, RHEL10 is a ways off and RHEL9 has quite a bit of life left in it.
Although personally, I am slowly moving my business systems out of the RHEL ecosystem and into the Debian / BSD ecosystem
Quoting: RenardDesMersI was shopping for a new monitor for black Friday and was debating with myself about how useful would HDR and Freesync features be since Wayland can't support those yet and I don't really know when they'll get decent support.If you're on AMD, freesync works just fine under Wayland. It was one of (many) reasons I switched my system over to Wayland.
Hopefully the wayland folks remember about the gamers when prioritizing the missing features.
Last edited by BlackBloodRum on 28 November 2023 at 2:20 pm UTC
wvstolzing Nov 28, 2023
So I suppose this is just to say that the xorg server will also be available only through EPEL -- since xorg-gnome is pretty much already deprecated, it's entirely reasonable & expected that RHEL should do this.
... which notion, of course, won't quell the 'display server freedom' riots over at phoronix forums. I'm 100% sure there will be several who'll 'read' this announcement as someone 'pushing a button' at Microsoft headquarters to cripple their 'computing life', or whatever.
rustybroomhandle Nov 28, 2023
Last edited by Jarmer on 28 November 2023 at 2:26 pm UTC
wvstolzing Nov 28, 2023
Quoting: TactikalKittyI want to switch over to Wayland but there is a bug in the nVidia 545 driver that is causing my system to freeze after a wake from sleep/hibernate event. This forces me to hard reboot every time. This seems to be a specific issue pertaining to this particular driver version and Wayland as this problem is reproducible on other distributions. The nVidia 535 driver doesn't seem to have this problem. Unfortunately, OpenSuse Tumbleweed doesn't have the previous driver anymore.
What's truly annoying, IMO, is that this bug comes and goes between driver releases.
*Otherwise* nvidia proprietary works fine *even with* wlroots nowadays (my experience is mostly limited to labwc though, which is the wlroots compositor that I'm most interested in); but this one issue is a total 'showstopper'.
Linux_Rocks Nov 28, 2023
BlackBloodRum Nov 28, 2023
Quoting: JarmerI switched over to full-time Wayland when Plasma 5.27 was released for one simple reason: the feature that allows you to push esc on a lock screen and instantly put the monitors to sleep doesn't work on X. It does on Wayland. There are other minor things, but honestly I didn't really notice much of a difference otherwise. I'm on an all-amd system though, so I know it's easier for me compared to nvidia users.Got to be one of my most favourite/used features. It's just so convenient once you get used to it.
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